Islamic Law and Society in Iran is a history of Islamic law in Tehran, the capital city of the Qajar dynasty. The book is a welcome departure from previous scholarship that focused on the introduction of Western-style law in Iran and the related process of legal modernization. Instead, Nobuaki Kondo delves into the nitty-gritty of Islamic legal documents with an eye towards shedding light on the Qajar judicial system and, to a lesser extent, the urban history of Tehran. His extensive use of such legal documents constitutes an original contribution to the historiography of modern Iran. He is justifiably critical of previous scholars who relied too heavily on European-language sources in describing the relationship between law and society in Iran. Kondo, therefore, sets out to avoid any assessments of whether Iranian legal modernization was a “success” or “failure” by instead attempting to understand the legal system on its own terms (p. 2).
Kondo is at his best when analyzing the Islamic court documents of individual jurists. His statistical analysis shows a deep understanding of these texts and serves as a solid benchmark for future evaluations of similar sources. Throughout the book, Kondo provides valuable tables with facts and figures culled from primary sources. His analysis of endowment (vaqf) records, royal inventories of crown and endowment properties, and government surveys and reports about buildings, reveals the usefulness of such sources in rewriting the urban history of Tehran. A similar methodology could be employed in future studies of other major Iranian cities.
Although Kondo has amassed an impressive set of sources, he could have provided the reader with a roadmap of the book's organization. The introduction does little to lay out the arguments of the book or to provide the reader with the underlying logic of subsequent chapters. It ends rather abruptly with a discussion of the primary sources. Chapter 1 is an overview of urban history in Qajar Iran and Chapter 2 is a summary of the Iranian judicial system more generally. Chapters 3–5 deal with various aspects of shariʿa courts while Chapters 6–8 address Islamic endowments. Throughout the book, the connection between urban and legal history is left unclear, as is the rationale for focusing on Tehran. Is focusing on a city crucial for understanding shariʿa in Iran because of the prominence of the mojtaheds who resided there? And if so, how did these courts differ (if at all) from their rural counterparts?
In a similar vein, the organization of individual chapters could have benefited from greater attention to analytically driven concerns. At times, the author provides lists of documents and thorough content analysis without much analytical framing or elaboration on the broader significance of specific legal cases. Chapter 5, for example, is largely a discussion of five types of legal contracts and transactions backed by statistics and tables. There is little in the way of an argument in the chapter's introduction (p. 74). Only in the concluding section does the reader learn about the significance of these transactions: namely that “shariʿa courts were indispensable to the city's economic and social life” (p. 98), a somewhat vague claim requiring a broader discussion of how exactly such transactions shaped the city's socioeconomic life. In later chapters, the book reads like a chronological manual of Islamic legal documents rather than a work of history.
Among Kondo's main arguments is that law in Qajar Iran was essentially Islamic law. Agreeing with Christoph Werner, Kondo views the state's function as being the mere executor of laws produced in shariʿa courts (p. 34). When the state produced rulings outside of shariʿa procedures, this is explained as being an innovation outside of shariʿa (p. 25). He considers the state's jurisdiction over the punishment of criminals, usually without the consultation of the shariʿa court, as essentially an administrative function (p. 25). Presumably, this is because he cannot locate a body of normative texts or a legal code that explains state punishments and rulings relating to crime. Such a narrow definition of law seems selective and meant to reinforce his claim that what constituted law in Qajar Iran was ultimately shariʿa (p. 71). Moreover, his own description of disputes tells a different story. When considering the function of the royal divankhaneh, for example, he defines it as an “administrative institution” rather than a legal one although he admits that “it also occasionally dealt with judicial cases” (p. 60). Elsewhere, he writes that “both parties frequently referred to the state and religious authority” and “there was no preference or distinction in their choice” (p. 69). This would seem to suggest that in practice the state was indeed considered a major authority in settling disputes and that what constituted the law cannot be reduced to shariʿa.
A more thorough engagement with the concept of custom (ʿorf) and customary practices may have provided Kondo with another framework for understanding state punishments instead of trying to situate such punishments outside the realm of the legal. Given Kondo's claim to adopt an anthropological lens (p. 2), this is precisely what the reader may have hoped for. The contribution of anthropologists to the study of law in non-Western contexts has been to avoid overly rigid definitions of law and courts and a strict separation between administration, law, social sanction, and custom. The reason for doing so is clear: to avoid judging the operation of law in one society by the paradigmatic yardstick of another (in this case European). Instead, by the end of the book, Kondo does what he explicitly claims he would not do: compare Qajar law to modern law in terms of modern standards such as “efficiency” (p. 169). Elsewhere, he suggests that the shariʿa court “differs from a modern court of justice in many ways” but does not elaborate on how (p. 54). Although he occasionally discusses parallels and differences with Ottoman shariʿa courts, a more comparative approach to contemporary legal systems in Muslim societies, especially in the introduction and conclusion, would have helped situate Kondo's important study within the broader field.
Kondo's book would have benefited from a discussion of how power affects the judicial system. We learn a great deal about the mojtaheds as legal experts but less about their vested interest in promoting shariʿa courts as a means of bolstering their power. Kondo examines state budget records in order to analyze the pensions of leading mojtaheds. He concludes that the Qajar state did not control the mojtaheds through pensions and they were therefore largely autonomous from the state (p. 53). While this may indeed have been the case, the mojtaheds were still beholden to the interests of their rank-and-file followers, rich merchants, and other powerful notables. Kondo never explains how these networks may have shaped the legal outcomes of the shariʿa court. Finally, this reviewer wondered how religious minorities may have used the shariʿa court for their own purposes. Given the popularity of the shariʿa courts with Jews and Christians in the Ottoman context, the question of whether Jews and Christians in Iran similarly made use of shariʿa courts, especially in cases involving inheritance and property rights after conversion to Islam, is an intriguing one that deserves greater attention.
Despite these criticisms, Kondo's book is undoubtedly an original contribution to the fields of Iranian legal and urban history. Given that it deals with highly specialized materials and often complex legal texts, this book would be most suitable for graduate seminars in Iranian and Islamic studies, or advanced seminars in legal studies more generally.
